Robert Reynolds & Shirleene Robinson. Australian Feminist Studies. Volume 31, Issue 89. September 2016.
Between 2012 and 2015, a team of researchers from three Australian universities joined with the National Library of Australia (NLA) to undertake a nation-wide oral history project focused on the life stories of lesbians and gay men. Oral history has been recognised as a successful means of obtaining information about communities and individuals who have been marginalised from broader national narratives. Studs Turkel’s body of work from the USA, for example, provided neglected working-class perspectives on the Great Depression and highlighted the day-to-day experiences of a wide variety of American workers (Turkel 1970, 1974). In Australia, key texts such as McCalman’s (1984) Struggletown a history of the working-class suburb of Richmond and Thomson’s (1994) Anzac Memories, which considers veterans’ memories in the context of the Anzac Legend, have revealed the way oral history can uncover overlooked voices. Oral History has also been used very effectively internationally to map a lesbian and gay past that might otherwise have remained unrecorded. The ‘Australian Lesbian and Gay Life Stories’ project, supported through an Australian Research Council Linkage grant, recorded interviews with 60 participants, born between 1921 and 1992. Participants were divided into different generational cohorts, to enable researchers to explore the changing nature of lesbian and gay life and lesbian and gay cultural narratives. This report will introduce this oral history project and the approach it deployed to map Australia’s lesbian and gay past through a collection of diverse life histories.
Social attitudes towards lesbian and gay individuals have changed significantly over the last 50 years. In many ways, shifts in public opinion have been nothing short of astounding. As Reynolds noted in From Camp to Queer, in 1968, a majority of Australians surveyed believed that male-to-male sexual activity should not be decriminalised; a notable minority thought homosexuals ‘should be whipped severely’ (2002, 11). Only 22% of respondents endorsed the idea that male homosexuality should be legalised (Wotherspoon 2016, 171.) A bare six years later, support for the decriminalisation had jumped to 54% in a Morgan survey as the social liberalism of the Whitlam era took root and lesbian and gay politics emerged in Australia. Today, opinion polls consistently show solid majority support for marriage equality in Australia, an achievement that would have been unimaginable (and probably unwelcome) to the gay liberationists of the early 1970s. In 2014, for example, a Crosby Textor poll found an overwhelming 72% of Australians supported marriage equality. This aim of this project was to explore the way such rapidly changing attitudes towards homosexuality impacted on lesbian and gay Australians and produced narratives of individual freedom and social progress, but also accounts of loss and nostalgia for earlier modes of being lesbian and gay. We hoped to illuminate, investigate and make publicly accessible the lived experiences of different age cohorts of lesbian and gay Australians and provide an insight into how individuals negotiate social change in their intimate lives. The project differed from previous Australian lesbian and gay oral histories in its close attention to the way that social change is experienced by individuals over time, and its consideration of how previous regimes of sexuality continue to resonate in the present day-to-day lives of lesbians and gay men.
Due to their social marginalisation, lesbian and gay Australians were long excluded from national narratives. The growth of academic interest in Australian lesbian and gay histories has been a relatively recent development, with the 1990s being particularly formative years. The earliest texts drew inspiration from the gay and lesbian liberation movement and were published with the intention of building community through the recovery of a homosexual past (Wotherspoon 1986; French 1993). More recently, a range of more academic texts have critically interrogated the emergence of the gay and lesbian liberation movement (Willett 2000; Moore 2001; Reynolds 2002). Most of these texts, however, have predominantly been based on meticulous archival and print research, rather than oral history interviews. One major exception has been Rebecca Jennings’ impressive 2015 work, Unnamed Desires: A Sydney Lesbian History, which was overwhelmingly based on oral history interviews.
Oral history has been deployed very effectively internationally to map a gay and lesbian past that might otherwise have remained unrecorded. Major texts such as Berube’s (1990) Coming Out Under Fire, Lapovsky Kennedy and Davis’ (1993) Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: A History of a Lesbian Community and Howard’s Men Like That: A Southern Queer History (1999) are amongst pivotal works that have revealed the potential of oral history to recast hidden histories. Lapovsky Kennedy, whose book with Davis investigated preStonewall lesbian history in America, has maintained that empirical and subjective values of oral evidence complement each other and are both rich resources for the contemporary historian (1993, 344-356) wishing to explore a homosexual past. Lapovsky Kennedy and Davis have argued that ‘the potential of oral history to generate full and rich documents about women’s sexuality might be especially rich in the lesbian community’ (1993, 430).
There are a number of existing collections of oral history interviews with members of Australia’s lesbian and gay community but there are limitations to this material. Many interviews are in the possession of individual researchers and are not publicly accessible. More interviews have been conducted with gay men than with lesbians, therefore further diminishing the history of Australian lesbian women. Local repositories such as the Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives in Melbourne play an invaluable role in collecting and preserving a range of LGBTIQ oral histories that would otherwise be lost but face constraints as they are largely reliant on voluntary staff and do not always have easy access to the levels of funding required to extensively catalogue and make accessible their oral histories. Understandably, the bulk of oral histories that have been collected have focused on activists within the gay and lesbian community, rather than ‘ordinary’ Australians. Broader cultural institutions also have collections that provide some insight into topics that pertain to the gay and lesbian population. The HIV/AIDS collection, for example, at the NLA provides some insight into a topic that greatly impacted the gay community but is only cursorily concerned with the broader and important life stories of lesbian and gay individuals.
The ‘Australian Lesbian and Gay Life Stories’ project was led by Robert Reynolds at Macquarie University and included Shirleene Robinson and Rebecca Jennings, also from Macquarie University, Graham Willett from the University of Melbourne, and Clive Moore from the University of Queensland, as Chief Investigators. Rebecca Jennings was unable to continue as an interviewer after moving to the UK. Project Research Assistant, Julia Miller, instead conducted interviews. Macquarie University provided funding for a PhD candidate, Daniel Vaughan, who also conducted a number of interviews for the project. Our collaboration with the NLA proved to be very rewarding. Australian Research Council Linkage grants support research that benefits both an industry partner and academic investigators. Industry partners support the project with both inkind and practical contributions. The NLA is Australia’s principal institution in the field of digitised oral history collection. Their partnership on this project meant that the academic interviewers on this project received training in recording technology from sound engineers and were able to utilise the top quality recording equipment held by the NLA. This partnership also meant that, where permission from interviewees was granted, interviews will be uploaded online, promoting public engagement with the material collected. This accessibility will transcend national borders, meaning that researchers and users both within and outside of Australia will have easy access. It will thus serve to foster broader awareness of gay and lesbian life and the ways in which lesbian and gay Australians have helped to shape transnational gay identities and culture. In return, from the individual and collective labour of the research team, the NLA garnered 60 interviews that are an Australian first and make a valuable contribution to the NLA’s collection. These interviews provide a resource equal to the ‘Before Stonewall: A Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered Oral History’ collection, which is held by the British Library Sound Archive Collection. The delivery of the ‘Australian Lesbian and Gay Life Stories’ interviews online exceeds the accessibility of the British collection.
Project initiation
Once the project was successfully funded, in March of 2012, the research team set about obtaining institutional ethics approval for the project, primarily to conduct the interviews. As there were three separate universities involved in the project, ethical clearance had to be obtained from each institution. A well-developed ethics process is an essential part of oral history projects and this has become increasingly significant in the digital age when access to interviews can transcend all traditional borders via the internet (Larson 2013). Researchers on this project were mindful that we were interviewing a group that has been particularly historically marginalised and that the impact of this marginalisation is still felt in the present day. Ethical approval, while time-consuming, provided an important opportunity to ensure that recruitment and interviewing were conducted with particular sensitivity. Permission forms allowed the interviewees to set the access conditions of their individual interviews. At each interview, our interview subjects (and the research team) had to navigate two sets of permission forms: the National Library forms that went into fine grain detail on the level of accessibility granted for the interview and a Macquarie University form that gave consent for the interview material to be used for research publications. Our interviewees would often read the consent forms as we set up the elaborate digital recorder. Generally, however, it was only after the interview had concluded that interviewees determined the level of access for their interview and the degree of anonymity required. This gave them the opportunity to reflect on how the interview had unfolded and how comfortable they were in being identified publicly. It also allowed for a more expansive and informed conversation between interviewee and researcher on what levels of accessibility and anonymity might be appropriate. Twentyone interviewees allowed unrestricted access to their interviews. Not surprisingly, these interviewees tended to be fairly open about their sexuality in most spheres of their life. For some, unrestricted access was a self-consciously political act whilst for others it was less a highly reflexive decision and more a simple reflection of how they lived their lives. As interviewers, we stressed to participants how easily their interviews could be accessed on-line and this sometimes led to tighter access being placed on an interview. Thirty-nine interviewees set a variety of access conditions. These included access to be considered upon individual request, access to be granted provided a pseudonym was used, access to be opened after the death of the interviewee or access to the interview to be granted after the interviewee had retired from their current employment or a certain period of time had passed. Others preferred that their interviews remained completely restricted until further notice.
Inevitably, some issues arose. One interviewee drank alcohol liberally throughout the interview and the researcher was later concerned that this may have impaired her ability to consent judiciously by the end of the afternoon. After discussing the matter with the research team, the researcher re-contacted the interviewee to check, in light of some of the difficult material that had been traversed during the interview, whether she remained comfortable with open access; she was. Another male interview subject gave open access to his interview but the researcher was troubled by the possibility of third party defamation and raised this with the NLA curators. After some discussion it was decided to close access to the interviews until those individuals potentially defamed in the interview were dead. In a number of other interviews, NLA curators checked with the research team whether the interviewees were sure they wanted open access when the interview indicated they were not ‘out’ to significant family members; most did. Our partner investigator at the NLA, Kevin Bradley, has written recently that oral history ethics require ‘a higher level of responsible behavior that transcends the codified legal requirements that a rights agreement embodies and which might govern any action’ (Bradley and Puri 2016, 83). It was certainly our experience during the project that the NLA conceived a duty of care that went beyond the strictly legal. Of course, a lesbian and gay oral history poses specific challenges on this front. Older interviewees are recounting sexual practices that were once illegal. Interviews might inadvertently identify other individuals who are not open about their sexuality (Chenier 2015). These concerns have to be weighed against the importance of chronicling lesbian and gay oral histories and there are sometimes no easy answers.
Recruiting and Oral History Interviewing
It was vital that the project was able to capture the voices of a diverse range of gay men and lesbians in order to provide a more inclusive and wide-ranging analysis of what it has meant, and means, to identify and live as homosexual in Australia. We aimed to include individuals from a range of ethnic backgrounds, thus more accurately reflecting the multicultural Australian community. We also endeavoured to ensure that rural Australia was sufficiently included in order to challenge notions that homosexual life is confined to urban environments. Furthermore, the inclusion of rural participants might be able to illuminate concerns that these individuals are more likely to experience homophobia than their citybased counterparts and that rates of suicide in rural areas are consequently higher. Given the lack of interviews that have been conducted with lesbians, we were particularly keen to interview women. We also aimed to ensure a mix of interviews that included all Australian states and territories.
It is fair to say, however, that the project was embedded in the method of lesbian and gay oral history more than queer oral history as outlined by its leading proponents (Boyd and Roque Ramirez 2012). Queer oral history, which has come into its own over the past decade, ‘destabilizes terms like identity and community from the outset’ (Murphy, Pierce, and Ruiz 2016, 17). This is in contrast to the classic texts of gay and lesbian oral history like John D’Emilio’s Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities which tend to privilege ‘the history of communities built on sexual self-definition’ (Boyd 2008, 183-184). Thus our project aimed to record the voices of women and men who currently identified as lesbian or gay. Boyd has argued such studies skew the data to those who ‘pridefully’ claim a lesbian or gay identity (Boyd 2008, 184). We do not necessarily disagree with this argument although we would want to finesse it. Our project was unquestionably constrained by the boundaries of participant self-identity. It was more informed by identity politics than a queer politics of sexuality (Murphy, Pierce, and Ruiz 2016, 14). We did not, for example, capture the experiences of women who had once identified as lesbian and were now living in heterosexual relationships, nor did we record the voice of men in current heterosexual relationship who also had sex with men (although some of our male respondents did report on how they had formerly lived this arrangement). We did not include trans* men or women unless they currently identified as lesbian or gay. For Boyd, such identity based studies fail to escape ‘the trap of subjectivity’ (Boyd 2008, 189). To her credit, Boyd underlines the difficulty for oral historians in escaping this snare because ‘it is through coherent and intelligible subject positions that we learn to speak, even nonverbally, about desire’ (Boyd 2008, 189). Perhaps unlike Boyd, we were less inclined to discern subjectivity wholly through the lens of a trap. Whilst the caravan of queer theorising moves on, many individuals in Australia continue to organise a life (at least partially) around being lesbian or gay and we were interested to record their experiences in an era of rapid change in social attitudes to homosexuality. Even so, it was still possible in many, if not all, of our interviews, to discern the discursive and psychological fissures inherent in taking up a seemingly stable sexual identity. In this sense, we approached lesbian and gay identities as ‘necessary fictions’ (Weeks 1995). Ultimately, we would like to believe that gay and lesbian oral histories and queer oral histories might co-exist as intellectual projects for they report on different, if overlapping, aspects of social life.
Our original intention was to conduct interviews with participants born between 1930 and 1994 who self-identified as gay or lesbian. While we had anticipated that we might not receive applications from people born before 1930, we received several and were able to expand our range to those born between 1921 and 1994. The 1994 cut-off meant that we would not be interviewing anyone under the age of 18, which would require a range of different ethical processes to be undertaken. We directed applicants to the website: www.australianlesbianandgaylifestories.com.au and also made a telephone number and postal address accessible for older applicants who may not have felt comfortable applying through the internet. Participants were recruited through a range of means including gay and lesbian newspaper advertisements, the Pride History Group in Sydney and the Queensland Association for Healthy Communities’ History Action Group in Brisbane, the Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives in Melbourne, gay and lesbian organisations across Australia and personal networks.
The mainstream media, in particular ABC Radio in locations such as Darwin and Brisbane, also covered the project and increased the span of our reach.
In the early stages of the project, we found gay men born after 1985 and lesbian women born before 1940 the two most difficult demographics to attract. Advertising and publicity from the LGBT press, including online mentions on platforms such as Facebook, provided a corrective to this initial lack of younger male applicants. We continued to find older lesbians difficult to attract, though through perseverance and targeting, we did manage to ensure a small sample from this group. In total, we received 365 applications from people who were interested in being interviewed. This presented a slightly difficult quandary – being in a position where we simply did not have the resources to interview all interviewees who had applied. New South Wales provided the largest number of applicants, with 32% of applicants being from this state. Our smallest number of applications was from South Australia, which only yielded 3% of applications. Of all our applicants, 49.4% identified as male, 44.4% identified as female and the remaining percentage identified as ‘other’ including transgender or gender diverse. Our most popular age cohort from applicants was those born between 1967 and 1983. These men and women formed 29% of applications.
From the outset, we were both influenced and inspired by the recent ‘Australian Generations: Life Histories, Generational Change and Australian Memory’ project, an Australian Research Council funded project collaboration led by Alistair Thomson at Monash University. This project deployed generational change as the key analytical tool. We were eager to consider how generational change might impact on lesbian and gay oral histories, believing this approach might be particularly fruitful when analysing lesbian and gay life experiences (Watney 1993; Russell and Bohan 2005; Reynolds 2007; Robinson 2008). Generational theory is certainly not without its critics. As Thomson has noted in writing up the research from the ‘Australian Generations’ project, theorists have criticised the apparent naturalness of generations as a master narrative (2016, 42). This essentialism can obscure the more mundane working of class, gender and ethnicity. However, our working hypothesis was that the specific experiences of being lesbian or gay over time had created something akin to homosexual generations. As Escoffier has argued in his analysis of the formation of gay generations, ‘a generational identity is formed from a shared historical experience that creates a distinctive attitude toward life, a sensibility and a collective state of mind’ (1992, 8).
We thus divided our participants into five generational cohorts organised around significant events in lesbian and gay history. We have followed this approach, in order to consider more closely Plummer’s statement that:
Generations are partially defined by a collective consciousness of shared experiences – usually a critical common life experience. It might help, then, to think about generations through shared critical life events – their crises and epiphanies – that are held in common and can generate what might be called generational collective memories. (2010, xi, emphasis in the original)
| Cohort 1 | Up to and including 1940 | Pre-liberation |
| Cohort 2 | 1941-1956 | Emergence of more visible ‘gay world’ |
| Cohort 3 | 1957-1966 | Gay liberation/HIV/AIDS |
| Cohort 4 | 1967-1984 | Rights and reform |
| Cohort 5 | 1985-1994 | Post gays? |
The Cohorts
The first group – those born up to and including 1940
This group of individuals reached sexual maturity at a time when male-to-male homosexuality was illegal and was aggressively policed. Past generations of gay men used public space for safe and unsafe cruising in a way that was not visible to the broader community (Moore 1995, 2006). Female homosexuality received little public attention and some women opted to ‘pass’ as men for a variety of reasons (Ford 2000). Some individuals from this group have recollections from the Australian home-front during the Second World War. Others remember the vibrant and rich ‘gay world’ that existed underground in the 1950s in Australia’s major cities (Willett 2000; Moore 2001). Some male respondents describe police entrapment. This group is able to provide an insight into the pre-liberation era and it is very important that their testimonies were recorded while this was still possible.
The second group – those born between 1941 and 1956
This group came of age during the 1960s and during the rapid social change of the 1970s when broader attitudes towards gender roles changed significantly. Respondents from this group are able to discuss the impact these changes did and did not have on lesbian and gay lives. This was an era when a more visible ‘gay world’ emerged (Willett 2000; Moore 2001). American and British trends and transnational networks also impacted on Australian lesbian and gay culture (Jennings 2010). Camp and social clubs gave many members of the gay and lesbian community the opportunity to socialise and to challenge homophobia (Moore 2001; Reynolds 2002). This was also an era when lesbian and gay people could be subjected to psychiatric ‘cures’ meant to ‘correct’ their sexuality or gender identity (Wilson 2008). Male homosexuality was still illegal across Australia.
The third group – those born between 1957 and 1966
This group were young when the gay liberation movement emerged in Australia and when its immediate impact was felt. The 1970s are remembered as an exciting and intensely political decade (Willett 2000; Jennings 2010). Growing numbers of lesbian and gay people showed enormous courage by organising politically, being public about their sexuality and taking to the streets to demand reform, challenge gender and sexual constraints and the criminalisation of homosexuality. A protest march in Sydney in June of 1978 became the first Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. The lesbian movement drew significantly from the mobilisation of the feminist movement in this era. Lesbian and gay individuals were also forced to confront the challenges of HIV/AIDS when the epidemic reached Australian shores in the 1980s. Australian gay communities helped to organise one of the best responses to this epidemic in the world (Sendziuk 2003).
The fourth group – those born between 1967 and 1984
These individuals came of age during and in the aftermath of the HIV/AIDS epidemic (Sendziuk 2003). They saw Tasmania become the last Australian state to decriminalise male to male homosexuality in 1997 and have witnessed the struggle for lesbian and gay rights continue into the present as activists fight for relationship reforms. The issue of same-sex marriage has continued to galvanise politicians and public debate. Gay parenting and changing reproductive technologies have enabled lesbian and gay couples to produce children within the context of a same-sex relationship. There is a growing awareness of the social, economic, personal and public costs of homophobia (Berman and Robinson 2010). The proliferation of cultural representations of homosexuality on television and film has recast the experience of growing up gay or lesbian.
The fifth group – those born between 1985 and 1994
Some individuals from this group feel that they live in a ‘post gay’ era, where there is no longer a strong sense of ‘gay culture’ whilst others remain highly attached to the idea and practice of gay community (Reynolds 2010). The rise of the internet has coincided with the lifespan of these individuals and as a result this cohort of young lesbians and gays are highly computer literate and technologically adept. For this group, social links are just as likely to be created on the internet as in person. Some members of this group speak of a diverse community redefining its identity, while others feel they can not relate to the term ‘gay and lesbian community’.
Our cohorts also reflect some of the unique historical events that gay men and lesbians in the UK and USA experienced given the dynamics of social change in the twentieth century. As Hammack and Cohler have argued:
The increased social activism of the 1960s that presaged the emergence of the gay rights era in the 1970s, the emergence of the AIDS pandemic in the 1980s, and the advent of successful antiretroviral treatment for HIV in the late 1990s, together with a shifting conception of samesex desire across a number of national settings, have been cohort-defining events. More recently, policy shifts that allow equal marriage rights likely represent cohort-defining events for same-sex attracted individuals. (2011, 164)
The specific oral history methodology deployed for this project was life history interviewing. Individuals were asked open-ended questions organised around broad themes: early childhood and family of origin; schooling; first romantic and sexual experiences; first awareness of same-sex desires; telling others about their sexuality; relationship history; interaction (or not) with established lesbian and gay social worlds; work life and sexuality; current life and hopes for the future. Within these broad parameters, participants were able to direct the flow of the interview as they wished, and they often did. As Plummer notes, life history interviews allow researchers to enter the subjective world of informants, ‘taking them seriously on their own terms and thereby providing first hand, intimately involved accounts of life’ (2001, 18). In studying individual identity, life history interviews deepen our understanding of the current moment by simultaneously illuminating and qualifying claims of social transformation. Individuals formed in certain moments do not disappear; they live in the present, their sense of self and behaviour constituted by a life-time of experience. Earlier modes of being lesbian or gay thus reverberate in the present, complicating and deepening analyses of social change. Again, as sociologist Plummer observes, it is ‘unlikely that we can begin to understand social sexual life without bringing into play an understanding of the simultaneous, synchronic workings of generations at the same moments of time’ (2010, 187-188).
All 60 interviews were completed on schedule, by October of 2015. All Australian states and territories had been visited. Indeed, Tasmania and the Northern Territory, regions often left out of accounts of lesbian and gay life, yielded a number of rich and diverse oral histories from women and men of varying age cohorts. The NLA is now making some of the material from the ‘Australian Lesbian and Gay Life Stories Project’ accessible online, depending on the wishes of the individual interviewees. There are two interviews with particular sensitivities that have not been made available through the catalogue in order to protect the individual interviewees involved.
Participating
We had hoped that the interviews might not only provide valuable historical material for future generations and other researchers but that they might offer participants an affirming opportunity to outline their own histories in a way that was meaningful to them. At the end of many of the interviews, interviewees often provided reflexive comment on the process and their experience of participating. For Jennie, living in Western Australia and born in 1949, participation provided an important opportunity to ensure her voice as a lesbian woman was recorded for posterity. At the end of her interview, she said:
… I said it was purely selfishness in order that my little history could be recorded somewhere.
It is – that’s the main thing. As was pointed out earlier, that it’s a very generous thing to do. She continued to assert that the interview process had been affirming for her. ‘I think it’s benefitted me a lot. If it can benefit others afterwards, then that’s fantastic’. There is a gendered inflection in Jenny’s comments here that we noted in other interviews. As a rule, male interviewees tended to demonstrate a less pressing need to justify their inclusion in the project. Many had a strong sense that their stories were worth telling. In contrast, some of our older female interviewees evinced a certain unease at their desire to be included in the oral history collection. So Jennie describes her participation as ‘purely selfishness’ that has to be counter-weighted by altruism. In this formulation, the interview becomes both an act of selfishness and an act of giving. The latter, if you like, excuses the former. Interestingly, the motivations of young female and male interviewees were not so riven by gender; indeed they were often fairly alike. Fresh out of their teens, young women and men were keen to put on the record the difficulties they had experienced growing up lesbian or gay and coming out in the hope that it would help create a world in which it was easier to be homosexual. Charlie, training to be a school counsellor, imagined a future where she could tell younger lesbians and gays, ‘a version of myself at that age’ that ‘it’s going to be all right’.
Tony, an Aboriginal man born in 1963, told us that participating in the interview had been:
… interesting. I live my life but when you start talking about it you go back and relive certain moments in your head because you have to talk about it. Some of that’s good and some of that is bad, but that’s just the way it is. With these projects, it will get filed away and that’s fine, not a problem, and someone may have use of it in years to come, when I’m gone. That’s the idea of doing these projects.
His emphasis of his oral history being ‘of use’, perhaps in later years, points to an awareness that the experiences of gay Indigenous men have been under researched and that he has an important perspective to offer future researchers. He also conveys a sense that perhaps his story may not yet be appreciated, at least in the present, and a hope that might change. There is poignancy to this quote for Tony died suddenly 18 months after he was interviewed.
For Helen, born in 1962, the motivation to participate was to highlight the difficulties faced by lesbian and gay people historically and to show the way that attitudes were rapidly changing. It was important to her to emphasise these shifts in attitudes as she had not felt that the freedom to live a lesbian life as a younger woman and had entered a heterosexual marriage. Now able to live openly with a lesbian partner, accepted by family and friends, she had personally witnessed substantial change. As her interview drew to a close, she reflected:
I thought about it and I thought this is important in life, that in 50 years’ time they can look back and say gee, that was hard then but for me who is 50 already, in 50 years’ time they’re looking back 100 years and saying wow, look how bad it was back then. When I was 17 and 18, there was no way, there was no way. For a 17- and 18-year-old now, look what – they can have any choice. They can say they’re bisexual until they decide, it doesn’t matter what you are.
There is a degree of wonderment at the pace of rapid social change in Helen’s quote that was shared by many interviewees. At times this wonderment was tinged with envy at the greater options available to gays and lesbian coming of age today. Helen was quite explicit about this in her characteristically good-natured way. Comparing the acceptance of homosexuality at her teenage son’s school on the Gold Coast today to her 1970s schooling she exclaimed: ‘Oh yes, totally unimaginable. Wish it was like that back then!’ In contrast, some older male interviewees mourned the thrill of illegality and transgression; for them, the mainstreaming of gay life was as much about loss as it was social progress. Eighty-year-old Merv lamented the demise of a vibrant culture of public sex at Brisbane beats which he had enjoyed during the post-war decades. Tony, who had come to Sydney from Wagga in 1980 and availed himself of the pleasures of the gay ghetto, was bewildered by the current lesbian and gay activist emphasis on marriage equality: ‘This whole marriage thing that’s been bubbling up for years, who’d want to get married?’
Initial Findings
With the final interview completed in late 2015, the research team has only recently gained access to the full set of interviews and transcripts for in-depth analysis. Nevertheless, by early 2015 team leaders Reynolds and Robinson felt confident enough to submit a proposal to Black Inc. publishers for a book based on thirteen interviews. The book Gay and Lesbian, Then and Now: Australian Stories from a Social Revolution (2016) charts the lives of women and men aged from their early 80s to the early 20s. Read cumulatively, the chapters illustrate 80 years of extraordinary social change, change that has accelerated in recent decades. Each chapter draws upon different interviews and most chapters draw upon a single life. In this method the individual life becomes a prism to larger social change. As Thomson has recently noted,
drilling down into the detail of one interview and examining the interconnections between experience and subjectivity across the life course … we can illuminate the complex intersections of personal history and social context, and how the ‘horizon of possibilities’ offered by particular times and places shaped generational identities. (2016, 49)
For the book, we chose to highlight one important strand of the project findings: the expanding capacity for individuals to live relatively ordinary lives as lesbians and gay men in contemporary Australia. Many of our interviewees welcomed this development and couched it positively in terms of progress. Charlie spoke eloquently of her desire to ‘have a family, hopefully get a house, work, have the same rights as normal straight people’. She insisted that: ‘We’re also normal. Build a future, raise our kids, retire, go on holiday, it’s the same thing. There’s no difference just because our sexuality is different’. We were often reminded of Weeks dictum that in the study of intimate and sexual life researchers should not underestimate ‘the importance of being ordinary’ (2007, 198). Of course, we are aware that this finding put us adrift of influential queer writing on homonormativity (Duggan 2004; Puar 2006). In a much cited passage, American historian Lisa Duggan has described homonormativity as the sexual politics of neo-liberalism, declaring ‘it is a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions but upholds and sustains them while promising the possibility of a demobolised gay constituency and a privatised, politicised gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption’ (2002, 179). Whilst not wanting to disregard this powerful critique of heteronormativity, we suggest in the book that our interviewees’ lives are often more complex and interesting than blunt application of theories of homonormativity might, on first blush, allow. Nevertheless, we were also keen to give a space to queer voices that echoed Duggan. In the conclusion of the book we introduce a young man at pains to resist the normalisation of lesbian and gay life. Living in the western suburbs of Melbourne whilst working for a LGBT newspaper, Matt was quite emphatic that he did not want to be considered ordinary or normal. He held fast to a tradition of queer life as an experimental way of living:
But there’s such a diverse and colourful and rich history in the LGBT community that immediately sets it apart from the heterosexual community and to just integrate it all together and be like ‘we’re all just normal and ordinary’, it almost erases some of that.
We hope to give greater voice to these queer counter narratives in a series of academic articles that will follow the book. At times, as we note in the book, we did wonder if there was a melancholic edge to our interviewees’ desire to be normal. But writing for a mainstream publisher inevitably requires compromises by academics, not least the sacrifice of intellectual and conceptual parsing. Mainstream publishers like big and bold headline ideas so we struggled at times to slip subtlety, nuance and caveats into the text. Perhaps then, the book unintentionally describes and enacts some of the benefits and losses of embracing the mainstream. No doubt our queer reviewers will have more to say about this.
Ultimately, however, it is our hope that the sixty interviews that form the ‘Australian Lesbian and Gay Life Stories’ project will be useful to both community members and academic historians and will provide a valuable resource to future generations. These interviews should not be viewed as the end point for the collection of lesbian and gay oral histories. Instead, they should be viewed as a collection that can be augmented, developed, and perhaps even queered over time.